Stockist Update - Kauri Cliffs, Northland
Stockist Update - Our First Restaurant
About four months ago, Jorgi the Salt Dog and I took the Baroness for a walk along Coopers beach to clear our heads after a long day observing the salt crystallisation process. By pure chance a local chap by the name of Barry Frith was also out for a walk and when he got back to his car he noticed the magnificent Mahindra salt wagon parked in the same carpark. The logo on the side doors caught his eye and when he got home he went onto the website hoping he had found a local supplier of Pork. You see not only is Barry a local, but he is also the Executive Chef at the prestigious Kauri Cliffs luxury resort just south of Matauri Bay.
Barry told me he was a little disappointed that we weren’t in fact Pork farmers, but he was also sufficiently intrigued about our little operation and we arranged for him to come and visit Taipa Salt Works.
After the tour the two of us got to talking. It turned out that the Kauri Cliffs kitchen had had a go at making its own salt using water from a beautiful beach within the property called Pink Beach. The trial had not been as successful as they had hoped, and one of the reasons may have been the method of evaporation they used. Boiling water to evaporate the salt is an ancient process, but toward the end of the process there are a couple of important tasks you need to undertake or you run the risk of losing the flakiness and of having your salt retain an almost bitter metallic taste.
We agreed there was really only one thing for it, and that was for The Taipa Salt Pig to collect some water from Pink Beach and see what the results were using our longer but more gentle process.
The results of that initial experiment were great and now we are into full time production for Chef Barry and his talented kitchen team. Once every couple of weeks I get the privilege do drive down to Pink Beach, pick up water and take it back to Taipa. At the salt works we have allocated our “Eigernordwand” evaporator at the bottom of Gertrude the Glorious especially for Kauri Cliffs. Pink Beach is a fantastic spot I’ve got to tell you. Just before Christmas I was down there on my own trudging buckets up and down the beach on a beautiful still bright morning. As I headed down to the water a small pod of Dolphins skipped its way across the bay, all you can do when that happens is smile and think about just how lucky you are to be doing this job.
We dropped our first batch of salt off to the kitchen at the end of October and we will be supplying weekly through summer and beyond. One thing we did notice, just as a passing curiosity, was the fact that the salt from Pink Beach is a completely different colour to the salt from Puheke. I did some research to find out why and it turns out that the composition of the beach has a direct bearing on this. Pink Beach is made up of billions of tiny pink shells and the action of the tide means that the water is saturated with tiny colloidal shell particles. The result is that the salt has a higher calcium content and just the faintest pink hue running through it. Pretty cool really if you are like me and into such salty matters.
So now as well as producing our truly delicious Puheke sea salt we are now the official finishing sea salt suppliers to the home of luxury in the Far North, Kauri Cliffs and the Robertson Lodge. A special thanks to all the wonderful staff at Kauri Cliffs who have been such a pleasure to work with.
I love my job.
